


a thousand letters in your pockets (good morning)

by contsansine (yujael)



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe, Domestic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-08
Updated: 2014-10-08
Packaged: 2018-02-20 08:32:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2422064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yujael/pseuds/contsansine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein York and Carolina have a tiny house in Canada and go three days without heat because neither of them know how to repair the furnace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a thousand letters in your pockets (good morning)

The thing is sea foam green and covered in black polka dots. York surprises her with it by laying it over her and waiting for her to get too warm and wake up. She gives it a once over and from the look on York’s face it has the answer to every question in the universe in its large pockets. It’s soft and goes right over her toes when she sits down with coffee, which is what matters more.

His is plaid and brownish and decidedly Uglier than hers.

-

“You know, I don’t think it’s actually that bad now.”

“You’re warming your hands up over the boiling water on the stove,” she reminds him from the table, taking a sip from her mug.

He grins and rubs his damp hands together. “Toasty. Possibly moisturizing, also. Feel that skin.”

She doesn’t feel that skin. But she does set the mug down and nudge him with her hip so she can get her hands in the steam. It’s pretty toasty.

“Look at us,” York says. “It’s only been one day. How are we gonna make it to tomorrow?”

“You’re going to  _love_  November and December.”

-

He stops boiling the water after eleven, when the temperature rises above ten degrees (“Fifty, but no one here knows Fahrenheit, York, get used to it.”). He’s not  _warm_ by any means, but it’s enough that he stops being over dramatic about it and goes to sit at the coffee table in the living room with the pile of paint swatches that he’s accumulated over the past three months.

It’s enough that she can shed the nice house coat and trade it for her smock. A small canvas is already waiting for her, for a warm up mess of colour to be spread across it. She forgoes paintbrushes this time, wants to practice the sharp arcs and lines with the new palette knives that came in last week. Mix, dab, swipe, dab. Mix, dab, curve. It’s covered in broad strokes of green and round violet petals before she deems it satisfactory and moves on to the much larger work in progress in the corner.

She loses track of time, but after an hour or so there are strings being plucked in the living room and York is humming along to the tune he’s been building longer than they’ve been here. She listens for a few minutes before the corner she’s working on pulls her back in. A garden grows here despite the chill. A careful vine twists away from the dirt. After another hour, she wipes her hands on the stained smock and hangs it up, pulls the house coat down and folds it over her arm as she leaves the room.

York is staring out the window in the living room with an expression that makes her to check that she actually did leave the palette knife in the cup of water on the counter behind her. (Makes her think  _Not the city_.) She did. By the time she comes back around to York, he’s turned to her and his features haven’t changed, but now that she sees his entire face it’s different. Maybe it’s the light, or maybe it’s how he blinks and says, “There’s a bunch of deer in our yard.”

She goes to the window, and there are four deer in the back yard, casually moving through the remains of their failed summer gardening project.

“That’s not unusual.”

“Well, they’ve never been there before.”

She leans to the right slightly to see the back fence easier. She’s not sure exactly when the break near the corner got there. It’s not an urgent problem, though. They can fix it after winter if they need to.

“I guess it’s nice of them to clean up for us,” York muses, rubbing his chin, watching a fawn nibble through a weedy looking shrub. “Where’s a camera? I want to document the first time we had deer in the yard.”

He wanders away to find his phone and Carolina has a brief staring contest with a doe closer to the window than the others. York returns and takes half a dozen pictures, smiling like a little kid that just discovered the existence of unicorns or something.

She stands to the side so that he can get good shots without comment, except for when he insists on having a shot of her with the deer in the background. She doesn’t have much to say about the amount of pictures he takes, partly because they’re good pictures, and partly because there’s not much to say to someone who insists they stop and pull over on the highway so that they can run back and get a picture of the first wild moose they’ve seen.

-

After the pictures are saved and they’ve have their fill of deer watching, she leans over the coffee table and glances over the colour swatches spread out in a series of more or less orderly piles. “So have you picked something yet or not? Because if you take much longer I’m just gonna pick one up and go with that.”

“No, I’ve almost got, really.” York rushes over and spreads his hands over the palettes somewhat protectively. He picks up two of them, one in each hand, for her to see. “It’s between these ones,” he waves the sheet of red-browns, and then the sheet of light blues, “and these ones. Look, this one matches.” He holds the first against his sleeve.

The red-brown gradient looks nicer than the house coat. He rolls his eyes and apologizes for not managing to find her a coat that made a good match for any of the better swatches.

 “Tomorrow’s going to be sunny,” she tells him.

“I’ll sleep on it,” he replies. “The furnace guy’ll come in and then we can lay down tarps!”

They collect the paint swatches and leave them in a box under the coffee table, except for the ones that York keeps in his hand. He puts those ones on the dresser in the bedroom, the final contestants in this contest he’s been holding for weeks. When he comes back, she’s already in the kitchen, thinking about vegetable soup versus noodles. Maybe vegetable soup  _and_  noodles. The sea foam and polka dot house coat is draped over a chair, and York tosses his over to join it.

"Grab the noodles," she says. "We’re having soup."


End file.
